Going Home
by cagalli-chan
Summary: [One shot] Heading back after a funeral two people discover what they lost: their loved ones and themselves. 'She doesn’t want to live in anyone’s shadow and she has a feeling that he doesn’t want to either.'


**Title**: Going Home  
**Pairing(s)**: not telling though there is really none; much implied relationships  
**Genre**: Romance/Drama/Angst  
**Rating**: T  
**Spoilers**: post-Destiny  
**Summary**: Heading back after a funeral two people discover what they lost: their loved ones and themselves.  
**Author's Notes**: Takes place way in the future post-Destiny so I would say 5-10 years if you really need a number to work with. Several people are already dead although I'm not telling as well as the characters being mentioned though to the perceptive kudos to you if you can figure out who I'm talking about before the end when I reveal the names. The almost-pairing at the end may not be to everyone's taste but they really never get together in the end so whatever.  
**Disclaimer**: The characters used in this show aren't mine. They belong to Sunrise, Bandai, and whatever other company has a say in their fate.

* * *

She sees him again at the funeral.

She is on the sidelines. She crosses her arms over her faded denim jacket, and watches the others grieve. It's a detached lesson in human psychology, and she feels like she's standing outside of her own skin, taking notes on the way the sun reflects of the sheen of sweat on the minister's forehead, and the way he curls his hand possessively over the handle of the casket, as if he's the sole pallbearer instead of just one of the four. She analyzes them as they stand too close together and occasionally touch fingertips, and she watches him brush tears onto the coffin's pale, sleek wood.

She and him ought to be the one in the center, giving the speeches. They're not. So she stands slightly apart of this tightly-knit circle, and stares at other people crying.

It was coincidental, she thinks detachedly, that _they_ both died in the same moment. As if a series of unfortunate events were going to happen to _them_ both and no one could stop it from happening. She had lost her and now _him_. She wondered if luck was never on her side.

Still, he's so invisible that it's not until he steps forward to fulfill his role as second-pallbearer-on-the-left that she realizes _he_ is finally here.

He isn't crying. He isn't anguishing. He looks haggard. He turns to look at her and a small, half-smile forms on his face, and it looks so horribly misplaced amid the tears that she feels like she should back away from it, but she doesn't because any emotion is worth looking at.

He comes up to her after everyone is leaving, and she takes her hands out of her pockets, expecting that he wants something from her, like they all do.

Some kind of vital reaction: a handshake, a hug, a nod.

Anything.

Proof.

Here is evidence of her grief.

He does nothing. He says, "You look like a rock star in that jacket," and offers her a cigarette.

She takes it. "How did you know I smoked?"

"I didn't."

He has a vicious smile, a wolf's smile. He isn't who she remembered him to be.

He takes the cigarette away from her and slides his own lips around it, dragging in the smoke, and hands it back to her, exhaling as he does. She takes it after a slight hesitation. No one has ever done that before, not with her. He's still looking at her.

"Where are you heading now?"

She gives him _nothing_. "Back home."

"Let me drive you back."

"I've got a car," she says, and doesn't know what to do with her cigarette. She drops it into the fake grass after a slight hesitation, and grinds it out with the sole of her shoe. "And it's a long way." It's not. She might not even go back. She struggles with her own apathy, and he takes advantage of the moment.

"It's okay," he says. "I'm on vacation."

And they both know it's both an excuse and an apology.

She looks at the frayed sleeve of her jacket instead of at him.

"Fine."

"Good," he says, and takes her arm, like someone out of an old-fashioned movie, and leads her to her car. She starts to ask how he knew it was hers, but snaps her mouth shut when she realizes it must be the only one, to him, that is unfamiliar. She unlocks the doors, and he, for some reason, takes the keys.

"I want to drive," she says, sounding petulant and childish, like it's not her car, when it is.

He looks at her for a second, and tosses the keys over the hood of the car. They crash against the red paint and chip it, but she doesn't swear at him. She just looks at the discarded paint flecks against the green grass, and stares at them until they look like drops of blood. The keys are cold when she takes them into her hand.

No one is watching them. _They_ both never had the power they had getting people's attentions but they themselves could not. Never could make everyone stare.

"Let's go," she says, and slides inside. Her skin sticks to the leather.

He gets in next to her. He's smaller than she thought, just an inch over her head, and his bones seem fragile and compact, covered by nothing but skin.

"Where are we headed?"

"North."

He says, "You're not as talkative as I remember."

"And you're not exactly the talk of the day."

"Point taken," he says, and stares out the window as she heads out of the parking lot. It's good to watch the fake grass fade away and be replaced by the natural, if dull, sands of the desert. She wonders if he's thinking the same thing.

She wonders why she cares.

"So what happened to you?" he asks.

She's snotty. "_He_ died," she says, like he's insensitive, and should know better. And it'd be a good answer if it _wasn't a lie. _"What happened to you?"

He draws a cigarette from his pocket_. "She_ died," he says.

He doesn't sound like he's lying. And she wonders why he would even do so. She drives.

* * *

She stops at a motel at midnight and, when she stops, thinks that she'll practically have to push him out of the car with her foot to get him to wake up. He hasn't said anything in hours, even when she skipped the expressways to find a more convoluted, nonsensical route. But when she turns the keys and stares at his still figure in the dark, he says:

"I'm awake."

She covers her surprise as best she can. "Good. Get out of the car."

"This motel is trash," he says as he opens his door and climbs into the air. She stands in time to watch him wipe sweat from his cheekbone.

"It's affordable trash," she says, and tries to prioritize, remembering that he has no extra clothes, and she only has an oily tee in the backseat. "We'll sleep, shower, and leave in the morning, and you can drop me off at school."

"Can I?"

He sounds smug. He's making fun of her. Maybe.

She ignores him. He's a gnat on the Wonder Bread of her subconscious. Something Zen, anyway. "Do you have any money?"

He turns his pockets inside-out, like he's even younger than she is. "Not a cent."

"Cards?"

"Not on me," he says. "Just tell them that you're famous." She almost laughs because it's almost true but stops herself. He's not near enough to put his hand against her jacket, but she knows that he'd be doing that if he was. He'd brush his fingers over the spangles and pull at where the sleeve was frayed.

"I'll pay," she says.

"Good plan."

"One room," she says, and thinks about tacking on some excuse, about not being able to afford two, or about him reimbursing her later, but she doesn't. She presses her lips together and tastes cherry gloss as it works its way onto her tongue.

He's looking at her. It's too dark to see his expression.

He says her name, like he's tasting her name. He says it slowly, silkily, smoothly, and lets it fade away into the darkness. She shivers and wraps the jacket tightly around her.

She likes the way it slides off his tongue, so she lets it pass. It sounds pretty, if a little antique. Like the name of an old-fashioned doll, dressed in cotton and lace.

She steps around the front of the car and is suddenly too close to him, because he's been walking, too. His hand is on her wrist, and he's feeling the jacket like she knew he would, but then he pushes up the cuff and his fingers are against her bare skin.

Then he's letting her go.

"You look so much like her."

She doesn't make the connection right away. She thinks it's a line, though she should know better, because he hasn't given her a line all night. She's waiting for him to tell her she looks like an angel, or a movie star.

"Who?"

His eyes are all over her in the dark. "_Her_."

She isn't going to love someone when he loved someone else first and she's not about to start looking for substitutes.

For a moment she almost believes herself.

* * *

The one room has two beds.

They stare at them for a while and then he sits down on the one next to the window. The bedspread is faded and natty, the color of rotting grapes. She sits down on the one across from him, and watches the new-falling rain make shivering patterns on the window. They should turn the lights on, but she doesn't want to get up again. She smokes.

He's still staring at her. She has to undress. She could sleep in her clothes, but it's awfully warm in the room. The air conditioning must be broken.

He says, "I wish I had a toothbrush."

She laughs; presses her hands to the pillowcase. It feels rough to the touch. "This isn't the kind of place that's going to give you one gratis."

He gives her a sort of benign, if not sad, smile. "I never said they should."

She can't see his face behind the veil of smoke she's creating. She's glad. She's blushing. This is, after all, the man despite all the attention wouldn't look at her back in the war. And, fifteen minutes away from offering to sleep with him, they're sitting on opposite beds, talking about _her_ and _him_.

He's silent. She wonders if he's even heard.

Then he says, "Maybe they should."

She sleeps with her clothes on. She doesn't dream.

* * *

He wakes her up at eight in the morning. He's showered, and she can smell the clean, piney scent of the soap on his hand as he sends it flying to land on her shoulder. When she washes up, his damp towel is hung neatly over the doorknob. She doesn't shower, because there's something eerily intimate about getting naked into a shower where the moisture from _his_ shower has yet to fade away. The mirror is still framed with pearly steam.

She brushes her hair and frowns, because her hair is long. She's particularly glad now, with the new sensibility of the morning, that she didn't sleep with him. In the dark, he could have pretended that she was _her_ and she could have pretended that he was _him_, and she didn't know what she, or him for that matter, would have done if one of them had whispered the wrong name at the wrong moment.

He's sitting on the bed and drinking a can of coke when she comes out. She flicks water at him off the edges of her fingers. The droplets splatter against his cheek.

"You're a mermaid," he says.

"Last night I was a rock star."

He touches his tongue to the wet aluminum of the can, and grins at her with his mouth open like that. She doesn't want to like it, wants to think that he looks like a puppy with his tongue lolling out like that, but it _is _cute.

"You look pretty."

"I look disgusting," she says, and threads her hair through an elastic band. She waits for him to look disappointed in the change, saddened that she's really herself and not _her_, but his thoughtful, teasing expression doesn't change.

"Pretty," he says again, and drinks some more Coke.

She wants a beer and he's sitting there, old enough to buy, and drinking Coca-Cola.

"I'm thirsty," she says.

He tilts the can towards her, and she shakes him off. Shrugging, he drains the rest of it and sets it down on the table beside him, instead of in the trash just a foot more away. That half-sheepish, half-evaluating look was still in his eyes, and it's making her uneasy.

"Thought you didn't have any money," she says. "How'd you get it?"

"I turned a trick with the salesman in the next room," he says. "He's got a mascara fetish and a wallet stuffed full of twenties. I'll pay for gas on the way home."

He was never the one for humor but times do change people. Especially for him. For a second, she believes him, and even thinks that she can see the worn shadows of the mascara around his eyes, but she shakes it off. He's smiling. The black lines near his eyes are nothing but dark circles. He probably didn't sleep at all.

"Seriously."

"Took some out of your jacket. I was hungry, too, but this place doesn't have any donuts downstairs."

"Been up for hours?" she asks, instead of questioning why he thought he had the right to drag money out of her clothes.

"Been up all night," he says, confirming her suspicions. He pushes a pillow at her over the bed, but with no real force. "Sleepyhead."

She doesn't think that he was _her_ type. He makes too little sense. She has the sneaking suspicion that _she_ could never have dated anyone she didn't understand, and he looks like he would reveal all anyone asked, but his revelations might not be translatable into any recognizable language. He's more than she remembered him to be, and probably more than she wanted him to be. He's teasing and obliging and insinuating and he must have been so much in love with her that she wonders why it took this long for her to understand that.

She wants to tell him that but instead she puts her hands into the pocket of her jacket.

"I'll buy you donuts down the road," she says. "I think there's a Krispy Kreme on the way back to my house."

Once they get on the road, she does. She buys him three frosted, with sprinkles. He sits on the passenger side of her car and licks icing off his fingers. The sun melts the sugar and it falls in drizzles down his napkin. When he's done, he crumples up the paper bag and sticks it under his seat.

"Want my milk?"

"You should always drink your milk," she says, not taking her eyes off the road. It took her two years to learn how to drive, and she still has the bad habit of weaving in her lane despite learning how to operate more complex apparatuses. A thought comes to her, and waits until he's done slurping at his milk to ask. "How are you going to get home?"

"I'll catch a plane," he says.

"You don't have any money." She'll give him some, if he asks, but he hasn't asked for anything yet, and she suspects that he never will.

"An ATM," he says.

She feels stupid for not thinking about it. "Sure."

"Unless you want me to stick around for a while," he says suddenly. She looks at him a little; sees the shine of icing is still on his lips. And with that the implication of what he is saying.

She can imagine it too. If he comes back with her they can maybe drive away their ghosts. They can stay up late at night talking about cooking and music, and if she wants, she can fall in love with him, and not worry about the repercussions. But she knows that it isn't real, and that it can't be real. She knows, in her heart, that the two of them will only amplify their deceased counterparts until they fill all of their empty spaces. They will make them, until the day one of them says the wrong name at the wrong time, and they will both be unable to pretend any longer.

"Sounds good," she says, "but it wouldn't work."

"Probably not," he says. "I'd screw it up somehow."

* * *

"It's green," he says. "Kinda fake-looking, don't you think?" 

She agrees with him, but doesn't say so. She wants another cigarette, but he hasn't offered her one since the last time they stood on artificial green grass. She guesses now that it was just a way to get her in the car. A boon. She stares down at his faded dress shoes instead, looking him up from the cuffs of his dark charcoal pants to the strange, wilting smile on his face.

"I hate saying goodbyes," he mutters.

He's just a tad bit ridiculous, this man, not much older than her, dressed in formal, funeral clothes and standing on a lawn with a dab of chocolate icing on his lower lip, hating to say goodbye. She wants to ask him if he said goodbye to _her_, but the question is stupid since she didn't, and she's felt stupid around him too many times over the last two days.

"Get it over with, then," she says, and offers him her hand.

He takes it with a smile. His is tanned, and warmer than hers, although not much bigger. She can still see the glint of her sapphire birthstone through his fingers, and then his mouth trembles, and she knows she's going to get the tears now that she didn't see him shed at the funeral.

Because first he lost _her_, and now he's losing whatever he had with her.

He's awfully close for a second, but it turns out that he doesn't cry. She rises up a little on her toes and kisses his cheek. She can taste aftershave, and her lips are rough against the faint brush of stubble. He brushes his hand over her hair.

"I wish…," she says and it sounds hollow to her own ears.

He strokes her hair affectionately again, and then traces his fingers down her neck and shoulders. It's almost a caress, but not quite. Like his form of an apology.

"Yeah," he says. "Me too."

She almost says, _Come on, come with me, stay with me, we'll make a go of it. We'll make them go away. I'll love you, and if at first, you only want me to be her, you'll forget soon enough what she was like, and you'll just think about me. You'll love me, even, and I can be a rock star, and you can be my knight in shinning armor. And I'll never ask to understand you, and you'll never ask why I don't care. And we'll live happily ever after._

But she is herself and can never be her. She has might have _her_ smile, and _her_ hair, and _her_ eyes and her attitude and beliefs, and somewhere inside her there must be even more of _her_ than they both realize but she bites her tongue hard enough to draw blood and she doesn't ask him to stay.

She doesn't want to live in anyone's shadow and she has a feeling that he doesn't want to either.

"Do you ever have the feeling that you're missing out on something really wonderful?"

Athrun looks at her. "I know I am."

"It wouldn't make any difference," Lunamaria says, and doesn't like the idea of having to explain it to him, but she knows he deserves an answer, because she _could _love him, yes, she can feel how easy it would be. "There'd always be someone else in the room."

"I'm sorry about this, Luna," he says, and offers her another cigarette.

They're right back where she used to be, and she takes it, and standing on the bright, sweet-smelling lawn of the yard, she breathes in the scent of smoke and bursts into laugher, although she doesn't know why.

_end

* * *

_  
AN: In case you still didn't get it both Cagalli and Shinn died during some 'event,' and Athrun and Lunamaria (who already lost Meyrin as well earlier) are there to pick up the pieces thinking of what could have been and want but don't between their loved ones and themselves. Pairings were Athrun/Cagalli and Shinn/Lunamaria with hints of the main 'pairing' Athrun/Luna.


End file.
